About
Julian C. Chambliss is Professor of English and the
Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. He is a core participant in the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (
CEDAR) and co-director for the Department of English Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab (
DHLC). His research interests focus on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. His recent writings on comics have appeared in
More Critical Approaches to Comics (2019) and T
he Ages of Black Panther (2020).
Beyond the Black Panther: Visions of Afrofuturism in American Comics, his exhibition is available as a
virtual experience at the MSU Museum. His books include A
ges of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience (2013),
Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural and Geopolitical Domain (2018), C
ities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (2018) and
Reframing Digital Humanities: Conversations with Digital Humanists (2021). His comics and digital humanities projects include
The Graphic Possibilities OER, an open educational resource focused on comics and
Critical Fanscape, a student-centered critical making project focus on community connected to comics in the United States. He serves as faculty lead for the
Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop (GPRW) in the
Department of English and Co-host of the
Graphic Possibilities Podcast. He also serves as faculty lead for
Comics as Data North America (CaDNA) an ongoing collaborative project at Michigan State University that uses library catalog data to explore North American comic culture.
Other Publications
Book
Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural and Geopolitical Domain edited by Julian C. Chambliss, William Svitavsky, and Daniel Fandino (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2018)
Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History edited by Walter Greason and Julian C. Chambliss (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2018).
Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience edited by Julian C. Chambliss, William Svitavsky, and Thomas C. Donaldson (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, September 2014), Paperback.
Book Chapters
Zeynep Teymuroglu and Julian C. Chambliss, “Forecasting the Past: Teaching Regression,”
Mathematics and Social Justice: Focusing on Quantitative Reasoning and Statistics edited by Lily Khadjavi and Gizem Karaali. (MAA Press: An Imprint of the American Mathematical Society, 2022).
“Introduction: Laboring for Freedom,” in
Turner Families Stories, edited by Andy Kolovos (Middlebury: Vermont Folklife Center, Summer 2021).
“A Different Nation: Continuing a Legacy of Decolonization in Black Panther,” in
Ages of the Black Panther edited by Joseph J. Darowski (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2020).
“Brotherman and Big City: A Commentary on Superhero Geography,” in
More Critical Approaches to Comics edited by Matthew J. Smith, Randy Duncan, and Matthew Brown (New York: Routledge, 2019).
“March 4, 1893,” in
Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers by Matthew F. Delmont, (Stanford University Press, 2019).
“Don’t Call Them Memorials,” in
Controversial Monuments and Memorials: A Guide for Community Leaders edited by David Allison
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018).
Julian C. Chambliss and Michael Gunter, “
Understanding Our Urban Environment Better,” in
Teaching Education for Sustainable Development at University Level edited by Walter Leal Filho and Paul Pace (Springer International Publishing, 2016).
“Archetype or Token?: The Challenge of the Black Panther,” in
Marvel Comics into film: Essays on adaptations since the 1940s edited by Matthew McEniry, Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert G. Weiner (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2016).
“War Machine: Blackness, Power, and Identity in Iron Man,” in
The Ages of Iron Man: Essays on the Armored Avenger in Changing Times edited by Joseph J. Darowski (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2015).
Articles
Wenxian Zhang, Rahim Raja, and Julian C Chambliss, “Race and Sport in the Florida Sun: The Rollins/Ohio Wesleyan Football Game of 1947,” Phylon 56, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 59–81.
Martha S. Cheng and Julian C. Chambliss, “
The 1909 Plan of Chicago as Representative Anecdote: Envisioning Citizenship at the Turn of the Century,”
Rhetoric Review (April 2016).
Kathryn Tomasek, Julian Chambliss, and Lloyd Benson, “Local Collections and Liberal Education in History,” In Proceedings of the 2012 NITLE Symposium, ed. Rebecca Frost Davis and Lisa Spiro. <
http://symposium.nitle.org/concurrent-sessions-tuesday-april-17-2012/session-2-d-panel/local-collections-and-liberal-education-in-history-tomasek-benson-chambliss/
Julian C. Chambliss and Denise K. Cummings, “
Florida: The Mediated State,” The Florida Historical Quarterly Volume 90, No 3. (Winter 2012).
“
Superhero Comics: Artifacts of the U.S. Experience,” Juniata Voices Volume 12 (Fall 2012): 145-151.
Digital Publications
Reframing Digital Humanities: Conversations with Digital Humanists
Growing from Reframing History, a podcast about history theory and practice, Reframing Digital Humanities: Conversations with Digital Humanists,
Julian Chambliss, Professor of
English at Michigan State University, brings together a diverse group of digital humanities practitioners to reflect on theory and practice.
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-62610-103-6
Projects
Comics as Data
A collaborative project that examines catalog data to explore North American comics. This project utilizes the largest publicly available collection of comic books housed in the Michigan State University Libraries (MSUL) to investigate how metadata might shed light on theme, locality, form, and aesthetics in comics.
Graphic Possibilities Comic Research Guide
A collaboration with the MSU Library, the purpose of this resource guide is to provide a foundation for people interested in studying, teaching, and contributing to comics and comics-based scholarship within the classroom.
Voices of the Black Imaginary Digital Oral History Project
VBI is a unique oral history archive derived from interviews with scholars and creatives engaged with Afrofuturism. Defined broadly, Afrofuturism offers a way to rethink the place of race, art, science, and design in society. With roots in a longer history of black speculative practice and Afrodiasporic experience, the practice and theory linked to Afrofuturism offers new ways to see and understand our world.
Critical Fanscape
Critical Fanscape is a collaborative digital project that utilize undergraduate collaborators to explore the MSU Library Comics Art Collection “Publication about Comics” subset. This project emphasizes digital recovery and understanding the critical cultural context linked to archive practice.
Advocate Recovered
Advocate Recovered is a digital recovery project focused on collecting and transcribing the fragment of the Winter Park Advocate, an African American newspaper published in Winter Park, Florida in the 1890s.
Graphic Possibilities Podcast
A project of the Department of English Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop, this podcast explores educators, makers, and scholars understand the comic medium
Reframing History
Reframing History is produced and hosted by Julian C. Chambliss and explores how historical narratives shape our perceptions of contemporary culture.
Every Tongue Got to Confess Podcast
Every Tongue Got to Confess is produced by the University of Central Florida Department of History, Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR), and the Association to Preserve Eatonville Community to explore issues linked to communities of color in the United States.
